Public Employees Seen in Greatest Danger at Workplace

Workplace violence is on the rise nationally and presents a particularly acute danger for public employees, a national workplace expert said Thursday.

“I just did a study of homicides going back to 1989, and even though public employees only account for 18% of the work force, they account for 30% of the victims” of all homicides, said Joseph Kinney, executive director of the nonprofit National Safe Workplace Institute in Charlotte, N.C.

Kinney, the author of the 1995 book “Violence at Work,” said that “a public employee is almost 50% more likely to be murdered than someone in the private sector.”

“What I’ve seen in my study is that public employees often feel they’re entitled to their job. So when something threatens it, they tend to react with intense and often irrational anger,” he said.

Kinney, who testifies as an expert witness in civil and criminal cases involving workplace incidents across the nation, said that a specific “trauma usually sets somebody off--either a job loss or an external problem like a divorce or financial problem.”

“These incidents almost always involve protracted problems that are not effectively responded to by management.”

The perpetrator, Kinney added, “frequently has a history of violence, and in about 10% of the cases drug abuse is present. But most often, it’s a combination of job and non-job issues that drive people over the edge.”

Kinney said those who commit workplace violence also tend to be white males who have some sort military training or background with guns.

“Men are more likely to commit workplace violence, because men are not very good at seeking support from psychologists, social workers and the mental health community in general.”

There are specific warning signs managers can look for to try to head off violent behavior, Kinney said.

“The big warning signs are irrationality, intense anger, bizarre behavior, a lack of concern about the future, a history of violence, access to weapons and military training.”

So far, only one state has addressed the issue of workplace violence and mandated training for its government managers and executives, Kinney said.

“New Jersey is the only state that has really grappled with this dangerous phenomenon. I just finished training senior government managers at a two-day seminar at Princeton University last week,” he added.

Another expert said statistics going back to the 1950s show that the overall number of injuries and deaths in the workplace has not risen that dramatically, and media attention may be distorting the public’s perception.

“Now it’s part of the lingo, going ‘postal,’ and part of people’s perceptions, but I don’t think the overall number of incidents is really up,” said Ron Riggio, director of the Kravis Leadership Institute at Claremont McKenna College.

But Riggio said that “it may very well be that when people engage in violence it’s a cry to be heard.”